Call for papers

1) 9th Pan-European Conference on International Relations

23-26 September 2015, Sicily

Panel on Transnational Religion, Conflict and Dialogue

For a long time, the discipline of International Relations (IR) has showed reluctance to take into account religion, both because of the dominant realist state-centric perspective, and as a consequence of the so-called secularization paradigm, regarding religion as an irrelevant or utterly negative factor. Scholars, particularly, widely accepted the so-called post-Westphalian pillars, according to which states are the only legitimate actors in international relations, and religion must not significantly influence politics, especially at the international level. As a consequence, until the recent rise of radical Islam, transnational religious actors were not regarded as legitimate actors in international affairs. Only since the 1990s, as a consequence of the growing relevance of such actors, often bypassing states, has IR started to take them into account. Researches have thus flourished about Muslim movements, but also about the transnational role of the Catholic Church and the US-based Evangelical organizations. A corpus of literature about non universalist religions, such as Hinduism, has also developed, mainly in relation to the role of the diaspora communities. As a whole, researches have highlighted that transnational religion can become a source of understanding and dialogue, but also of conflict and violence. This section aims at casting light on both sides of this dichotomy by analyzing transnational religious movements belonging to different religious traditions and geographic/cultural areas both oriented towards conflict, violence and terrorism, and oriented towards peace, dialogue and reconciliation.